Social Science Research Council

Obama performed some imperative, long overdue work in bidding us “to choose our better history.”  In doing so, he recognized the complexity of our history, for if there is a better history, there is also a worse.  There is the George Washington who owned slaves and the George Washington who opposed torture. The worse history, Obama didn’t dwell on—an inaugural address was not the place for that.  Rather, he invited a new beginning, though without amnesia or false innocence.  He invited us as a nation to perform a necessary twist on the seventeenth-century notion that we were divinely elected, “God’s new Israel,” entitled to establish dominion.  In Obama’s version, Americans get to choose—to choose perennially—from among multiple and intertangled strands.  We were, from the beginning (in fact, from before the beginning) a people of more than one history—freedom and slavery, cooperation and savagery, republic and empire—not easily disentangled.  That is why the choosing has to be intricate, deliberate, subtle, ongoing. [...]